The war on science™

According to Science Left Behind (book review), there's a war on science, and it isn't raged by conservatives alone. Progressives are also ideologues who refuse to listen to the science - it's just other areas that they dislike.

Conservatives:

Climate change (science: it is happening, and is caused by humans)

Evolution (science: it is true)

Progressives:

Homeopathy (science: it doesn't work)

Vaccines (science: they work and are do not cause autism)

GMOs (science: they are not harmful)

Organic foods (science: they are not always better)

In vitro meat (science: it is fine, and better in so many ways)

Biological gender differences (science: there are some)

Anything else?

5 comments:

I guess the difference is that the Progressive people who believe the anti-science items are on the fringe of the Progressive community. The Conservative people who deny evolution and climate change are in the mainstream of conservatives.

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.